Is it possible for gluttony, purity, and morality to coexist with affordability? Or is this utopian vision a myth?

My personal conversion to organic food came via orange juice. I was brought up drinking the conventional, extra-pulpy stuff from a paper carton, downing quarts of it on a daily basis. Then, while living in New York City after college, I discovered a grocery store offering an extra-premium, organic variety with bucolic visions of rustic farm crates and golden sunshine on the label.

The flavor was unlike any other bottled juice I had ever known; it actually tasted like the juice of an orange. This was most distressing. What exactly was that mysterious orange liquid I had been drinking my entire life?

I was instantly converted. To be able to buy a product that not only tasted amazing yet was also not tainting the earth with pesticides and preservatives felt like a tremendous leap for both the orange farmers and me.

Then I looked at the price—seven dollars a quart.

I love drinking real orange juice and not destroying the planet, but my ability to do both is directly related to my supply of disposable income. Without that disposable income, paying a premium for organic food—as well as local, fair trade, and sustainable—becomes exponentially harder to justify. At a certain point, when only the relatively rich can afford to not ingest bovine growth hormone on a regular basis, appreciating food and where it comes from becomes a bourgeois endeavor akin to collecting Fabergé eggs. When fair trade bananas hit five dollars a pound, consumption starts to seem conspicuous.

The selection was limited and the prices were cheaper for bulk sacks of flour and cooking oil by the gallon. Milk and eggs were surprisingly expensive, possibly as a tax on non-vegans.

But that assumes that eating along the nexus of organic-local-sustainable is always synonymous with gourmet prices. If eating on that spectrum were affordable, then little stands in the way of abandoning the factory farm system. It's quite possible that the high costs of organic food are solely the result of grocery store markup and have nothing to do with whether or not the food was drenched in chemical pesticides.

I thought I might try to calculate whether bargain shopping could coexist with this idyllic vision in the greater Washington, D.C. area. The result was mixed. In theory, that thrifty, magnanimous, and self-indulgent organic lifestyle is possible, but in practice, it gets complicated.

Consider this: Whole Foods is often considered the hub of overpriced food snobbery, yet its organic brown rice was far less expensive than what was sold at an oversized grocery store in a much poorer part of town. Obviously, this had to be a mistake of Whole Food's pricing structure, as it goes against one of the central tenants of economics wherein products are valued at whatever you can get someone to pay for them. Why charge more to the population less likely to pay more? It only begets conspiracy theories.

Of course, Whole Foods also sold plenty of things that weren't organic or anywhere close to being local as well as a handful of dried pineapple strips in a small, resealable sachet covered with horizons of overzealous field workers for the same price as two full-sized pineapples. But I can appreciate that sort of value-added graphic design. Buying an overpriced sack of organic rice with no value-added delusion was just downright depressing.

At a nearby grocery mart, bags of organic carrots sat right next to the non-organic ones. If there is any real test of one's dedication to buying organic, this might be it: two bags of similar products, looking nearly identical to each other except for the price tags and whether or not the word "organic" was prominently displayed. Sadly, given financial constraints and no value-added packaging to indicate the lifestyle choice I was entering into when purchasing, I could imagine deferring to the cheaper, non-organic variety. They are just carrots after all.

Then there are the quasi-eco items that walk right up to being organic without actually being organic. A sack of reasonably priced "All-Natural Brown Sugar" was particularly bewildering, as there is no USDA standard for "natural." Does "natural" imply non-organic farming techniques, GMOs, or that the company just couldn't afford to get the USDA Organic certification? And is it better to poison yourself with a dash of preservatives rather than encourage factory farms to spray neurotoxins on their wheat crop? That then opens up the question about whether eating within the nexus of organic-local-sustainable is more of a personal endeavor or a moral endeavor, and would anybody pay a dollar extra per pound not to poison the well-water of a small farming town that he most likely would never visit?

While I stood there for a good five minutes pondering the deeper meaning of "natural," an elderly lady in a large overcoat and a church hat walked up and grabbed a sack of processed white sugar without hesitation. I quietly wondered if she didn't care about the nutritive loss in processed sugar, or if she just had better things to do with her time.

On the other side of town, the closest community co-op sold nothing but organic, fair trade produce alongside notices for community acupuncture and homeopathy classes. The selection was limited and the prices were cheaper for bulk sacks of flour and cooking oil by the gallon. Milk and eggs were surprisingly expensive, possibly as a tax on non-vegans.

Some of the newer grocery chains had a growing selection of relatively inexpensive organic options alongside the standard fare of diet microwave popcorn and preservative-laden instant cake mix. In particular, Trader Joe's offered plastic-wrapped organic products that were shipped in from the other side of the country at a reasonable price. It was the polar opposite of the farm-fresh local market, but if the idea is about not ingesting pesticides in an affordable way, this certainly wasn't a bad option.

Sadly, the high costs of local farmers' markets quickly eliminates them from competition. Shopping at the market on a lazy Saturday morning, perusing rhubarb grown by a friend of a friend, and then making a pie from those ingredients felt like the ultimate goal of all this food snobbery. Who needs small packets of dried blueberries with images of humble farm workers when you can spend your time chatting with farm workers? Everything is delicious and nothing gets poisoned. It's this potential utopia where gluttony, purity, and morality live side by side if only the local organic blueberry farmers could somehow reduce their price point.

Getting a community supported agriculture (CSA) share where farm fresh food can be bought in bulk for cheap is a possibility, but access to CSAs is often limited. The food is local, but not necessarily organic, and there are restrictions that come with only buying food that's in season. Even if you give up the need for Florida-grown, flavorless slave-labor tomatoes in the winter, there are other sundries that need to be bought. And those need to be bought at grocery stores.

Maybe with the combination of a CSA alongside a dedication to bargain hunting and cost-benefit analysis, then sure, it might be technically possible to live the life of an ethical gourmand on the cheap.

As a comparison, the low-rent grocery store a few blocks away from me offers chicken wings at two dollars a pound. Compare that to the eight dollars a pound of air-chilled, free-range, "Step 5" chickens found elsewhere. For 10 dollars I could buy a large bag of mystery wings and have my dinner for the rest of the week, but just the thought of it was all too depressing. What sort of chemical injection trauma must those chickens have suffered to make them four times cheaper?

The secret hope is that this current trend of foodie-ism, food snobbery, locavorism, gastronomy, or whatever it gets called becomes permanent and eventually leads to better, cheaper food for everyone. Otherwise I will have to learn to appreciate chemically flavored orange drink, and nobody wants that.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.